I had helped my uncle assemble his new PC from parts a week-ago Saturday, and last week it developed an obnoxious tick that forced it to shutdown after just a few minutes of operation.

A couple of weeks ago my uncle came to my house to have me shop around for some parts to build a nice low-price but high power PC. We looked for pre-built PCs, barebone kits, and raw parts selections. I think he got overwhelmed, but decided on an expandable, but already plenty powerful barebones kit with a socket-939 mainboard, AMD64 3500+ processor, 512MB RAM, a nice case, and 450W power supply. We added a CD-ROM drive and 160GB IDE HDD, and he had to have Windows XP, so we got Home Edition.

The following Saturday it arrived at his house, so I went over and helped him assemble it on Sunday. All was working, and the game for which he had to get the upgrade (too slow on his old PC) worked just fine.

He called me around Wednesday to ask if I could return to his house to help him out. He said that "after a while" he got a black screen with just the message "hard drive not found," and he had to wait to reboot and then it would work again. He didn't have a very clear explanation, no matter how I tried to get it out of him. He called on Thursday after he'd written down the exact message, but it sounded like the POST message wherein the PC found no hard drive, not a Windows error. I told him I'd try to get out soon to fix it.

On Sunday my aunt called while he was away to ask if I could make time because he was frantic, thinking he'd been duped and that the PC was crap, and that he'd have been better off going with some higher priced, lower powered name brand. Like I'd set him up with a bogus system.

I told her I'd come out on Monday, as I was busy being taxi-dad for the girl-child as she visited friends' graduation parties.

My first thought was software configuration error. My second thought was unsafe computing led to a virus. My third thought went to equipment failure.

Today I trekked out there to take a look. He showed me how the failure occurs. He turned on his PC (which he'd patiently left off all day so it'd reliably crash in front of me). Windows booted just fine and all seemed good. He started his game, and went about making a few things move, and then the machine rebooted. It was indeed a POST error: No bootable hard drive found...

I tried several times to power down and restart, trying to see if the machine was having heat-related or BIOS problems, but to no avail. At this time he noted that he'd usually go away for an hour or more before trying again. I could see why he was frustrated.

The machine would reboot just fine, and the BIOS changes didn't make any difference (turned off SATA, made CD-ROM first bootable, little tweaks like no FDD search [he doesn't have one]). No matter how long we waited, the drive wouldn't come back.

I took the case apart and thought to disconnect the HDD to see if that was the problem. Maybe the drive was funky. As I pulled on the (provided with the mainboard) IDE cable, it exploded in my hand. Not the kind of chemical, dangerous explosion, but just plastic and metal bits cracking and breaking and flying all over. The "plug," for lack of any other term I may know, broke. Simple as that. I pried the part of the plug that was socketed into the drive out, removed the cable from the PC, and pointed out the broken bits to the aunt and uncle, proclaiming I'd found the problem.

We set out to find another IDE cable. They live in a far(ther) out suburb than I do, and the closest "computer" stores they have are Best Buy and Office Depot. I wasn't holding out hope to find any internal parts such as an IDE cable. I'm blessed with a MicroCenter just an exit down the freeway from my house (yes, I visit at least once a week), but my house is twenty some miles from their house. I thought I remembered a computer store between their house and the mall with the other stores, so I'd hoped we could stop in there and find the parts.

Sure enough, it's labeled just Computers on the marquee sign in the parking lot. We thought to give it a shot. It struck me as a little mom-and-pop shop, with a few gamer's cases on display, and a wall of parts, including quite visibly a selection of IDE cables. They had standard ribbon-style cables for $10 or the newer round-style cables for $15. I bit for the extra $5 and got the newer style.

We returned home, plugged in the new cable, and all was good. I made a few software adjustments (in particular removing the unused SATA RAID driver that the mainboard driver disk installed), and set him loose.

We (the girl-child had come with me) declined an offer for dinner, as the wife had promised to cook. We got home minutes after the wife did, so no cooking ensued--I instead ran for take-out.